John Weston Smith

John Weston Smith decided on a career in medicine despite coming from a family with no medical background or experience of higher education. His father was a wages clerk for the Midland Red Bus Company and his mother a housewife. John was encouraged in his choice by Margaret Sheldon, the family GP. He lived at home as a student.

After qualifying he worked as a registrar in obstetrics at Dudley Road Hospital in Birmingham, but then decided on a career in general practice. He worked as an assistant in a practice in Birmingham but also opened his own practice, with friends and family members as patients, on 5 July 1948, the first day of the NHS.

He struggled to find a partnership because he had been a conscientious objector on religious grounds during the war. He moved to a two handed practice in Tamworth, Staffordshire, in 1949, where he …